Romance Bloody Romance

Remix album features contributions from Alan Braxe, Erol Alkan, Josh Homme, and Final Fantasy, among others.

Worst release of 2005. Beyond awful. Listen, I know a lot of people out these parts didn't dig DFA79's mini-metalisms
on You're A Woman, I'm A Machine-- too hard, too soft, too boring,
not boring enough, vaguely misogynistic, etc. You wrote these things to me
and I have all your emails in a file somewhere.

But understand a simple, if not mathematical fact about this two-piece
bass-and-drum duo: By necessity their songs have little to them. They're efficient
bursts of less-is-more rock that ride riffs hard then cut out right before
they stale. I'd have thought at least one motherfucker tapped for this
turkey-shot remix project would have figured that out. Instead we get
Justice on some reverso Advantage shit, making "Blood on Your Hands"
sound like the theme to Super Pitfall, and that game's the fucking
worst.

Hey, let's talk Bloc Party's Silent Alarm Remixed,
from which we might pretend Romance Bloody Romance took some Ps and
Qs. SAR, remember, featured a different producer doing up a different
track from the Bloc's debut. Then it came sequenced just like Silent
Alarm, and a few of us (me) actually liked it better than the
original LP-- more variety, less helicopters, etc. SAR at least made
sense, since every Bloc track physically had a bunch of possible
reconfigurations. Romance, meanwhile, has four telling remixes of
"Black History Month" (the band's worst song), three of "Romantic Rights",
an OK new song and a cover of former Peel favorite La Peste's "Better Off Dead".
Inexplicably, nobody behind the papers realized after the second or third
dude asked to remix "Black History Month" that maybe, maybe, DFA79's songs aren't
suited for the full-on remix treatment-- they don't need it either.

Listen, I respect the renewed interest in tripping up rock-kid disco
homophobia (still rampant) with these Phoned-in remix blitzes of late. Vice
Records, seems, is fighting the good fight. But the Braxe/Falke and Dählback
joints here are so flimsy, that vocoder'd out Makuziak futuro-disco bullshit
so obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek, I can't imagine anybody really psyched to
hit up his neighb Fixed or Making Time party to try out his new Diesel
hightops on the dancefloor. Final Fantasy's string arrangements for "Black
History" have their charm, sure, but only Trash's Erol Alkan turns in the
album's non-bomb, a simple edit of "Romantic Rights" that overlays
percussion tracks for an intro and flips the vocal track a disorienting
half-step early. Which is saying something: If the game is to make rock
tracks playable in clubs, why fuck with them more than you have to? What's
so bad about disco edits?